Arkham City seems hellbent on throwing this back in my face.by Mischief Maker 12/02/2020, 7:03pm PST
Holy shit, does this game exist to throw back in my face all the jokes I told about Asylum. Gotham's supervillains are literally put in a walled off ghetto and slowly starved to death. What a shockingly grim game about a funnybook character. Even the running gag of Batman telling people in insanely dangerous surrounds, "stay here, you're safe now" is lampshaded hard.
Gameplay-wise this is a total improvement over 1. I don't know if it's because the camera zooms further away now than before, but in Asylum I was struggling to get a combo in the teens while in City I'm knocking back 40+ combos in random encounters like it's nothing. The dive-gliding is fun, but still not quite as fun as Saint's Row Gat out of Hell, but here's hoping it's even better in Knight once that's done downloading. Besides the gliding, I found the open world nature of the game kinda eliminated the need for challenge stages, as I had as many combat and predator encounters as I wanted on-demand and earning XP at the same time.
In terms of aesthetics the music remains excellent, but the brown-o-vision visuals are a real letdown after the colorful Tim Burton look of Asylum. I just found the whole thing incredibly ugly.
Looking forward to playing 3 with the Adam West Batman skin and matching Batmobile!